Sustainable Spirits Made from Local Grains at Short Path Distillery

Eating local food is a great way to make our diets more sustainable. Whether we shop for in-season produce from farm stands and farmer’s markets or frequent farm-to-table restaurants, there are many points of entry to start filling our plates with delicious local food products. But what about filling our glasses?

Short Path Distillery in Everett, Massachusetts, is committed to supporting New England farms by sourcing all of their ingredients locally, including the grains they purchase from Valley Malt in Holyoke. “From the beginning, we’ve wanted to use the shortest path for our ingredients to get to us,” says Zachary Robinson, owner and distiller of Short Path. “Our rule of thumb is to stay within 300 miles of the distillery — within the grainshed.” 

grainshed (n.): a localized supply chain of grain and grain goods including malt, flour, beer, distilled spirits, and baked goods

Short Path’s Commitment to Supporting a Sustainable Supply Chain

Distilleries can play an important part in supporting the local grainshed, since large quantities of grains and malt are required to distill spirits at scale. (It takes approximately one ton of grain to make one barrel of whiskey.) When Short Path first started distilling, they were making a couple barrels of spirits each year; now, they aim to produce a barrel each week. Short Path is a part of Valley Malt’s “Acre Club” for loyal customers, and Short Path’s production has supported nearly 250 acres of grain-growing farmland.

“By supporting local grain, you’re not just supporting grain, you’re also supporting local vegetable farmers who are switching their crops over,” Robinson explains. “You’re supporting farmers in general, and you’re also supporting the local environment, because you’re helping to maintain the lakes, streams, and environment that surrounds farms.” 

The connection between grain farming and vegetable farming is not always obvious, but it is nonetheless important. If a farmer plants only vegetables season after season, this practice will eventually tire out the soil, sapping it of nutrients. Then, in order to continue production, a farmer will have to fallow their field (leave the field unplanted to allow the soil to regenerate organic matter), or they will have to continually add more fertilizer to the soil. 

Alternatively, they can plant grains between seasons of vegetables, which replenishes nutrients in the soil and lessens the need for fertilizers. With less fertilizer added to soil, there is less fertilizer running off into local streams and lakes. In addition, the farmer saves money in two ways: by purchasing less fertilizer, and by not having to leave a field to fallow. “The same goes with pests,” Robinson explains. “If you're rotating your crops, you are breaking the pest cycle. … Then there’s less pesticide running off into our lakes and streams.”

Whiskey and Terroir

Robinson sees Short Path’s commitment to using local grains not only as an important means of supporting farmers in the Northeast, but also as integral to creating delicious, unique distilled spirits. “Terroir is not just for grapes,” Robinson says. “If you can’t taste where your grain is coming from, it says a lot about the grain you’re using.”

For Robinson, sourcing grain locally from farmers in the Northeast allows for a hands-on relationship with the grains that will ultimately become their spirits. “If we deal with farmers directly,” he said, “we can go to our farmer who grows our rye and say ‘We want this rye grown this way, and we’ll buy 20 acres worth of it.’ Whereas an agribusinesses, they don’t know you. They’re only going to grow what they know they will sell in large quantities.”

Robinson recognizes that price is an important factor when it comes to sourcing grains for distilling. “We’re not the Midwest, we’re never going to compete on price with commodity grains, but you can compete on other things: quality, terroir, different varietals that grow here and don’t grow in the Midwest,” he says. “You get a distinct flavor from grains grown in Maine compared to those grown in Iowa.”

Short Path’s rye whiskey offers a unique opportunity to see how a changing climate will impact the spirit. Their rye is made with grain that comes from a single farm grown in a single year, making terroir even more evident as the growing conditions of the grain are distinct from year to year. “The joy of the rye is that it’s raw, not malted — it’s just grain,” Robinson says. “The first year we did it was a dry year, the second was a wet year. It looks like this year is going to be pretty wet again. It’ll be interesting to see how the rye tastes.”

Barrels also have an important effect on creating distinct flavors in whiskey. Most cooperages in the United States are in the Midwest, but Short Path sources barrels from as nearby as they can by working with Adirondack Cooperage in Ramsen, New York.

Communicating their commitment to sourcing local ingredients to their customers is a priority for Short Path. “When we go out and pour samples for people, we try to communicate the distinction of buying whiskey that is just locally made versus one that is made using local ingredients,” Robinson says. “We’re one of the only distilleries that does use local ingredients, and that affects the flavor.”

Northeast Grainshed Alliance: Impact Beyond the Distillery

In addition to his work at Short Path, Robinson serves on the advisory board and 2023 Steering Committee for the Northeast Grainshed Alliance, a diverse stakeholder organization committed to building a local food chain that spans New England, New York, and New Jersey. The Alliance has over 150 members, including grain farmers, maltsters, millers, bakers, distillers, brewers, and researchers. 

“We’re product-blind as a grainshed,” Robinson says. “We just want grains growing back in the Northeast.” For Robinson, the importance of creating a sustainable food chain in the Northeast goes beyond wanting to access high-quality grains for distilling purposes. “As COVID showed us, with all of these shortages, is that if the supply chain breaks down, there’s no food grown in the Northeast anymore. There’d be mass starvation,” he says. “We need farms and to make sure farming is viable in the Northeast.”

Hannah Smalls is the Executive Director of the Northeast Grainshed Alliance. “People don’t realize that grains can be grown in the Northeast and the benefits of it,” she says. “It's not really talked about as much in the local food movement.”

Smalls explains that creating regional supply chain hubs allows for small businesses to connect with one another and extend that connection to the consumer. “In each state there are farmers that work with millers; Oechsner Farms works with Valley Malt and Ground Up Grain, a miller-malter dual business,” Smalls says. As consumers understand the importance of supporting the grainshed and seek out products made using local grains, businesses all along the grain supply chain benefit.

Both Smalls and Robinson believe that creating consumer awareness and enthusiasm around Northeast-grown grains is important to sustaining a local food chain. “A lot of people, when they think of grain farming, imagine the Corn Belt out in the Midwest — thousands and thousands of acres of farms,” Smalls says. “In the Northeast, it’s a smaller scale, so they’re able to have really good plans on climate resiliency.” These plans for climate resiliency include practicing crop rotation and maintaining biodiversity — options that can be difficult to execute at an industrial scale.

The SQFT Project

The SQFT Project is an initiative of the Northeast Grainshed Alliance that aims to educate consumers on the connection between local farmland and their favorite grain-based treats, like whiskey, beer, and baked goods. The Northeast Grainshed Alliance created a SQFT calculator as a tool for their members to calculate and show their consumers the square footage of farmland used to produce the grains for a product. “Our mission with this project is to have people develop an understanding of what we consume and how it relates back to the farmers in our region,” Smalls explains.

Short Path’s New England Single Malt Whiskey carries a 68SQFT logo, meaning that sixty-eight square feet of farmland is needed to produce one bottle. “With the SQFT Project, you can look at a product and understand how much field it takes to produce its grains,” Robinson says. ”It’s helpful because no one really knows how big an acre is—43,560 square feet. To a lot of people, 100 acres seems big, but how does that translate on an individual product scale?”

What You Can Do to Support Your Local Grainshed

Robinson acknowledges that drinking local can be a complicated task: “People will say, ‘I like to support local farmers.’ But what are they actually doing?” Smalls and Robinson have these tips for figuring out how to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to seeking out local grain products.

Connect with people all along the supply chain: “Be mindful of what you’re putting into your body, where it comes from, and what processes it goes through,” Robinson says. “People can come into the distillery and find out from our whiskey what farms it comes from, and I can even give you the contacts of the farmers and the malters. They’re all actual people that you can go talk to if you want to.”

“Always stay local—it’s better to know that farm and really see what practices they use,“ Smalls says. “It all goes back to knowing your farmer and their processes.”

Pay attention to ingredients: “We think it’s really important to seriously think about the ingredients,” Robinson says. “Alcohol is the only consumer product [that doesn’t require] a label with an ingredients list. We try to list everything that’s in our spirits on the label. We want to be open and transparent about what’s in there and where we get it.”

Understand what you’re paying for: “You’re paying a premium, yes, but you’re getting a higher quality product,” Robinson says. “If [farmers, distillers, and bakers] are going to be charging higher prices, they want to make sure that their quality is really good.”

Look for organic grains, but don’t write off conventional farmers: “The organic business is growing in the Northeast because now many farms have been doing it long enough that they’re finally able to be certified,” Robinson says. “It takes years — it’s hard to do. I always prefer organic, but you can’t expect small farmers to do too much too fast. Even conventional grain farmers have climate conscious practices, like cover cropping, fallowing their fields, and planting a variety of crops on their lands year after year.”

Smalls says, “If you can go to a farm and create a relationship, you may see why they don't have a certification, but they still use a lot of different climate resiliency farming practices”

Julia Cooper’s Good Libation: New England Single Malt Whiskey from Short Path Distillery 

Short Path’s New England Single Malt Whiskey is distilled from 100% Northeast malted barley.

The whiskey is double distilled in direct fire copper pot stills before aging in American oak barrels for two years. The spirit evokes the terroir of New England, and each bottle supports farming on sixty-eight square feet of Northeast farm fields.